Re: Solaris ZFS on Linux [Was: Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org regarding reiser4 inclusion]

David Masover
2006-08-01T04:24:28Z

Timothy Webster wrote:
> Different users have different needs.

I'm having trouble thinking of users who need an FS that doesn't need a
repacker.

The disk error problem, though, you're right -- most users will have to
get bitten by this, hard, at least once, or they'll never get the
importance of it. But it'd be nice if it's not too hard, and we can
actually recover most of their files.

Still, I can see most people who are aware of this problem using RAID,
backups, and not caring if their filesystem tolerates bad hardware.

> The problem I see is managing disk errors.

I see this kind of the same way. If your disk has errors, you should be
getting a new disk. If you can't do that, you can run a mirrored RAID
-- even on SATA, you should be able to hotswap it.

Even for a home/desktop user, disks are cheap, and getting cheaper all
the time. All you have to do is run the mean time between failure
numbers by them, and ask them if their backup is enough.

> And perhaps a
> really good clustering filesystem for markets that
> require NO downtime.

Thing is, a cluster is about the only FS I can imagine that could
reasonably require (and MAYBE provide) absolutely no downtime.
Everything else, the more you say it requires no downtime, the more I
say it requires redundancy.

Am I missing any more obvious examples where you can't have enough
redundancy, but you can't have downtime either?